How the Universe Works (2010) s03e03 Episode Script
Jupiter: Destroyer or Savior?
Jupiter, A cosmic colossus reigning over the other planets.
Take the planet earth, now get 1,000 of them, And that's the size of jupiter.
Hidden beneath its swirling clouds Lie the secrets of our solar system's foundation, Of our planet's violent youth when the biggest thing in the solar system Is moving this far this fast, It changes everything around it.
and the birth of life.
If it wasn't for jupiter, right where i'm standing, There might be gigantic meteor impact crater.
Now, scientists are unlocking The giant planet's secrets and discovering that jupiter, More than any other planet, shapes our solar system's Past, present, and future.
Without jupiter, most certainly, We wouldn't be here to talk about it.
Captions paid for by discovery communications Jupiter Named after the roman king of the gods, the god of the sky, It looms between the four inner rocky planets And the three frozen gas giants beyond.
It is our largest planet by far.
Jupiter is the king of the planets, And that's because it is the biggest of the planets.
It has a storm on it that's actually four times Bigger than the earth itself, And it's been raging for hundreds of years.
It has dozens of moons, this gigantic magnetic field.
Everything about jupiter is just huge.
It doesn't do anything small.
If you were looking at our solar system from afar, You'd look and you'd say, "Our solar system is made of the sun, Jupiter, and assorted rubble.
This vast planet Contains the clues to our solar system's formation, Its evolution, and its eventual death.
Jupiter is a cosmic time capsule.
If only we could open it.
In the roman myth, jupiter, the god, Drew a veil of clouds around him to hide his mischief, And that's, to some extent, What's happened when we look at jupiter.
We're seeing not the surface of a planet, But the edge of a cloud.
This shroud of gas hides jupiter's deepest secrets.
One of the big mysteries of jupiter Is what's at the very center.
What is its core? And this is something that we actually don't know yet.
But we do know that what's happening inside jupiter Gives the planets its power.
If we want to know more about what's going on In this king of the planets, We're going to need to be able To part those clouds and peer inside.
Simple physics tells us Its massive atmosphere is the stuff of nightmares.
Because it's a gas giant, the atmosphere, As you get deeper into it, just gets denser and denser And the pressure gets higher and higher.
From the cloud tops to the planet's center Is 43,000 miles.
That's a three-Day, nonstop journey in a jumbo jet.
The decent would be a hellish roller coaster ride.
And we know this, because we've tried.
The galileo probe orbited jupiter for years Looking at the cloud tops of the planet And the moons that orbit it.
But at the end of the mission, they decided they could do One more scientific experiment.
December 7, 1995.
Nasa's galileo space craft drops a 750-Pound titanium probe Into jupiter's atmosphere.
It slams into the cloud tops at over 106,000 miles an hour.
Even though jupiter looks calm and serene from a distance, As you get closer, You realize that there are ferocious winds, There are lightning storms, And there are pressures that would crush any instrument.
The planet is 1,000 times the mass of the earth, And that means as you go inward, The pressures and densities become very large.
The probe sensors reveal that hydrogen Makes up 90% of jupiter's atmosphere.
Temperatures soar to over 300 degrees.
Winds rage at 400 miles an hour.
It's hotter and more turbulent than scientists ever imagined.
entering jupiter's atmosphere, And just 95 miles down, the probe vaporizes, Leaving most of jupiter's secrets beyond our reach.
We can't reach the planet's center, But at the national ignition facility outside san francisco, Scientists can recreate conditions deep inside jupiter.
There are a lot of other facilities Where we can generate, say, States that are found at the center of the earth Or some of the other terrestrial planets, But this is the only place You can recreate the deepest interior of jupiter.
The team takes hydrogen, The most common element in jupiter, And freezes it, increasing its density.
Then, they fire up the world's largest laser.
Multiple laser beams race through a series Of amplification chambers, Intensifying by a quadrillion times, Until, perfectly synchronized, the beams converge.
For 20 billionths of a second, The laser bombards the hydrogen with 1,000 times more energy Than the entire united states uses at any given moment.
It turns out that at those very extreme pressures, A hundred million atmospheres of pressures, Chemistry is just completely different.
Instead of really distorting the chemical bond, Now, you're distorting how the atom itself behaves.
Matter behaves in a fundamentally different way Than we experience it here on earth.
The atoms break down, Transforming the hydrogen gas into a liquid -- A liquid metal concentrated deep inside the planet.
Essentially, you would have This very dense structure, And it perhaps would look like this massive ball Of mercury at the center of jupiter.
Under immense pressure, The liquid hydrogen emits energy as heat, Pushing temperatures at the edge of this metallic sphere Up to 11,000 degrees.
What lies inside remains a mystery.
There could be a little rocky planet Underneath all of that gas and all of that liquid.
It could be more of a ball of super compressed ice.
There probably is something solid down there.
It's the processes happening inside jupiter That give the planet its power -- Power to shape the solar system since its earliest days.
Apart from the sun, Jupiter is the biggest influence in the solar system.
But this monster is shrinking.
Is jupiter losing its power? A thousand times more massive than the earth, Jupiter could swallow all the other planets In the solar system twice and still have room for more.
But this giant is getting smaller.
Gravity is still bringing All of the gases and liquids together.
And that heats up the interior of jupiter.
This heat rises up to jupiter's surface And escapes into space.
The planet cools and shrinks, Making the gas giant a third smaller today Than when it first formed.
As the planet cools, The shrinking slows from an inch a year in its infancy To just a few fractions of an inch today.
And scientists calculate it could continue shrinking For 1,000 billion years.
Even then, it will always be the solar system's Biggest, most powerful planet.
Jupiter is shrinking too slowly for us to see, But we can see the effect of this rising heat.
This is actually one of the reasons jupiter Has the spectacular weather -- All of those beautiful bands of clouds.
On earth, the sun's heat drives our weather.
Switch off the sun, and our weather would stop.
But jupiter's weather would keep on going.
Its weather doesn't come from the sun.
It comes from deep inside the planet itself.
Heat rises up through the boiling soup of gas, Churning its cocktail of volatile chemicals, Creating jupiter's spectacular swirling clouds.
And the whole time, the giant planet spins.
At 29,000 miles an hour, Jupiter rotates faster than any other planet In our solar system.
Jupiter rotates on its axis about once every nine hours, Compared to a 24-Hour day for us.
So, huge, super-Heated clouds from the interior Get smeared out by the rotation, And we have the beautiful cloud tops of jupiter.
This marriage of heat and motion spawns a monster.
Jupiter's red spot is a gigantic cyclone, Larger than the size of the earth, And has been rotating stably with winds in excess Of 250 miles per hour for over three centuries.
Imagine a storm that lasts for 300 years.
On earth, cyclones die when they hit land, But jupiter has no land to stop its storms, Almost unlimited heat to fuel them And a rapid rotation.
Jupiter is basically stoking The fires of the great red spot.
We're used to storms growing and then going away on earth, But if they're spinning the right way, Because jupiter is so big and spinning so quickly, They feed into each other, and it keeps the storm alive.
Long after the other planets freeze and die, Jupiter will still be pumping out heat, Driving its monster storms, Thanks to its immense size.
And the secret of its size Lies in the infancy of the solar system.
Just over 4.
5 billion years ago, In the disk of dust and gas leftover From the sun's formation, the first planet forms.
Jupiter began to form early on and began to gobble up Water, frozen comets, meteors, and grow.
When you imagine a litter of animals, One of them usually wins.
And the one that wins is the one That begins to eat the most first.
The same thing happened with jupiter, in some sense.
Jupiter forms at the right time And in the right place -- Just inside the frost line, The point 325 million miles from the sun Where water vapor turns to ice.
Close to the sun, Rocky planets cannot grow very big.
A little bit bigger than the earth, And the planet falls apart.
Further out, however, Ice is a glue that can hold rock together.
And so you have massive rocky ice planets Big enough to capture hydrogen gas and become a gas giant.
Close to the sun, Gas is too hot and energetic to stick to anything.
Out here, gas is cold and sluggish.
So, when gravity pulls gas towards jupiter's core, It sticks, And jupiter balloons.
And as it grew, its gravity grew, And therefore, its ability to gobble up more increased.
So it was the lucky winner By starting early and eating often.
The planet eats everything in its reach Until it becomes the giant we see today.
But 4.
5 billion years ago, jupiter is in the wrong place.
It's spiraling towards the sun and a fiery death.
The biggest planet with the biggest influence, Jupiter is unique in our solar system, But not in our galaxy.
October 1995, scientists discover The first planet beyond our solar system.
is a giant gas planet, Similar to jupiter in every way except one.
The first exoplanet found orbiting a star like the sun Was a huge surprise.
It was called a hot jupiter Because it's something roughly the size of jupiter, But it was tremendously close in to its star, Much closer, even, than mercury is to the sun.
Since that first discovery, Astronomers have identified hundreds of gas giants Outside our solar system.
Many orbit extremely close to their parent star.
The planet wasp-33 b, Orbits so close to its star That its surface is a scorching 5,800 degrees.
It's the hottest planet ever observed in the universe.
Now, we know that planets like that can't form there.
It's just too hot to be able to coalesce from all the gas.
These hot jupiters must have formed farther out.
How do you get a jupiter-Like planet That close to a star? Somehow, you need to be able to build a big planet And then move it in.
And this had us asking all kinds of questions.
If we see it going on elsewhere in the universe, Is that how our own solar system worked, too? So now, when we look at jupiter, We think, "all right, that's where it is today, "But it doesn't mean it's always been there.
"It could have moved all over the place, "And it just ended up where it is -- Where we find it today.
" The question is how? How did this giant planet end up where it is today? And what effect did a migrating jupiter Have on the other planets? In 2011, walsh and his team re-Imagined the solar system.
They set jupiter adrift, and in the process, They solve one of the solar system's greatest puzzles.
We would build our models, would get a venus Right where the venus is supposed to be, Would get an earth right where the earth is supposed to be.
But where mars is today, We were usually getting a venus or earth-Massed planet.
No matter what we did, no matter how we changed the model, We were always getting a really big mars.
All of our simulation Showed that mars, where it is in the disk, Should be at least ten times the mass that it is.
Something came in and literally ate mars' lunch.
And that something was jupiter.
Four and a half billion years ago, Jupiter forms 325 million miles from the sun, Roughly a third closer than it is today.
The orbiting planet collides With the debris left over from the sun's formation, And these collisions slow it down.
It loses momentum, And the sun's gravity pulls it closer.
Jupiter spirals inwards, Gobbling up the raw materials that should have made mars.
So, seeing that result, seeing a great solution To the small mars problem was kind of the eureka moment.
Like, well, maybe there's a mechanism out there.
We know that planets migrate.
So, let's put these two things together, And maybe this is going to work.
As jupiter travels inwards, It bulldozes the rocky material that lies in its path.
On the inward migration, there's a lot of material there.
It actually pushes almost all of that, About 80 % of it, inward.
And when we make the movies in a certain way, It really looks like a snowplow.
The gas and dust squeeze Into an inner disk around the sun.
As jupiter orbits, It pushes against this disk, creating a bulge.
The bulge races round the disk, pulling jupiter with it.
Jupiter accelerates and tries to pull away from the sun.
But the debris behind jupiter continues pushing inwards.
It's a cosmic stalemate, With the planet trapped between the inner and outer disks.
Then, something extraordinary happens.
The giant planet changes direction.
As we're building this model, We've had this vision of jupiter coming inwards, Turning around and going outwards.
And we thought of it as a sailboat, Kind of tacking, coming about, turning through the wind.
So, the name "the grand tack model," It actually comes from sailing terminology.
But jupiter is no yacht.
It's a giant supertanker of a planet.
Changing its course is going to take something Seriously powerful.
Enter the solar system's second largest planet, Saturn.
Like jupiter before it, Saturn has spiraled inwards, closing in on the giant planet.
Amazingly, there was this wonderful interplay Between jupiter and saturn.
As they ate up all the material around them, There was a gap in the disk left over.
With less material behind jupiter and saturn, There's less holding the planets in place, Allowing the force from the bulging disk To fling jupiter back out, With saturn hitching a ride.
The key for stopping jupiter's inward migration In the grand tack is saturn.
Saturn growing at the right time and at the right place Allowed it to migrate close to jupiter and change And stop jupiter's inward migration.
Saturn saves jupiter from a fiery fate.
And this grand tack Leaves a parting gift, the earth itself, Because when jupiter migrates out, It leaves behind the rocky debris it bulldozed in.
It's from this debris that the earth forms.
But beyond mars, jupiter's powerful gravity Pulls on the debris, preventing it from sticking together, Leaving the rubble scattered as a band of asteroids.
Jupiter's gravity is so strong that it determines in some ways What can exist where in the solar system And what can't.
The rocky planets, Our planet, And beyond mars, The asteroid belt, They all exist because of jupiter's epic journey.
When the biggest thing in the solar system Is moving this far this fast, It changes everything around it.
Five million years after it first formed, Jupiter reaches its present orbit.
Its outward movement And the inward pull of the sun's gravity are finally balanced, But this is still not the solar system that we see today.
The end point of the grand tack model Was actually the ideal beginnings Of what we think happened Later on in solar system history.
But from this stable orbit, Jupiter is about to trigger a deadly domino effect That threatens to destroy the infant earth.
Four and a half billion years ago, Jupiter orbits between the rocky inner planets And the icy outer planets.
From this strategic vantage point, The gas giant dominates our planetary system And unleashes hell.
In the early environment of the solar system, Where there was a lot more junk surrounding the earth And in the inner solar system, the earth was bombarded, As were all other objects, at an incredible rate.
It's an incredibly violent time in solar system history.
We refer to that timescale about several hundred million years After the planets actually formed As the late heavy bombardment.
These were very large-Scale impacts And they actually do create melt pools -- Liquid rock on the floors of these impact craters.
And some of those craters can glow hot For tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years, In some cases.
If you were actually on the earth at that time, There would have been enormous balls of dust Continuously thrown into the atmosphere.
The sky would be hazy, cloudy, And the terrain would be mountainous From the rims of craters all around, rocky, And a wholly unpleasant place to be.
Today, the scars have healed.
Glaciers advance and retreat.
Volcanoes erupt.
Wind and water erase our planet's dust.
But the evidence is still visible if we look up.
Look at the moon.
Every night, you see the moon coming out, And it's pockmarked, Because for about a billion years After the solar system was formed, there was chaos.
In 2011, nasa's spitzer space telescope Reveals this kind of bombardment around another star.
Astronomers see a vast disk of gas and dust Circling a young star called eta corvi.
This may be evidence of icy comets and asteroids Swarming into its inner solar system.
Four billion years ago, The same thing was happening in our solar system.
There was a wave of material, asteroids and comets, That swept in from the outer solar system.
It turns out it probably came from jupiter and saturn, The outer planets.
As they were orbiting the sun, They were interacting with each other gravitationally -- A very complicated dance.
Jupiter goes around the sun three times Every two times that saturn does.
And so, when they would migrate outwards, They'd be locked in this resonance.
They'd be very close to each other.
And at some point, as they were moving around, Their gravitational powers basically combined, Got a little bit better at affecting the material Around them.
Together, the two inner gas giants Sling the two outer gas giants, uranus and neptune, Even farther out.
Uranus and neptune swap places.
Neptune slams into the frozen dust and gas In the solar system's outer reaches, Scattering icy debris far and wide.
In the inner solar system, This debris collides with the asteroid belt.
Billions of comets and asteroids swarm Across the orbits of the earth, moon, and other inner planets.
If that had persisted, Then life never could have evolved.
Only after a few hundred million years Was it possible for life on earth to develop.
But this destruction contains the seeds of creation Because the icy comets deliver a precious cargo.
Jupiter periodically disturbs Objects in the outer solar system, largely water objects, And directs the towards the earth.
Nowadays, that would be a disaster, But in fact, if you look at the water on earth, It's quite likely that almost all of the water on earth That's now here came from ice that impacted upon the earth, Directed here by jupiter.
Every ocean, every river, Every drop of rain may owe its existence to jupiter.
The gas giant may have even sowed the seeds of life itself.
The chemical building blocks Of life may have hitched a ride to earth on-Board a comet.
Without jupiter, life would have never started, And it would have never survived.
The main bombardment ended 3.
8 billion years ago, But a threat remains.
Every day, nasa's near-Earth objects program scans the skies For potentially dangerous asteroids and comets.
So far, they've spotted over 10,000.
And it only takes one to cause a catastrophe.
Just three miles wide, This small comet is big enough to wipe out life on earth.
Luckily, jupiter is in the way.
Jupiter acts, in a lot of ways, Like the protector of the inner solar system.
By shepherding comets in its vicinity, Ejecting them from the solar system, Jupiter helps protect the earth itself.
In a sense, the way objects move in a solar system Is a little bit like a roller derby.
You've got all of these objects moving around the sun In the same direction, going around and around and around.
But they have gravity, and they can interact with each other.
Imagine this skater in white Is an icy comet racing in from the outer solar system.
The skaters in black are the gas giants.
The comets veer across the planets' orbits Until it encounters jupiter.
Jupiter moves faster than the comet.
Then, the giant planet's gravity Grabs it and gives it an assist in a slingshot maneuver.
The comet steals some of jupiter's momentum, Accelerates, and changes direction.
Jupiter can fling it out of the solar system By giving it that extra velocity, And it goes away.
It's ejected.
Jupiter slings objects out and stands guard.
Every year, 200 times more comets and asteroids Smash into jupiter than the earth.
Something had to be there like a sheriff To clean out all the riffraff and clean out all the debris, And that's the planet jupiter.
If it wasn't for jupiter, right where i'm standing, There might be gigantic meteor impact crater.
Without jupiter, most certainly, We wouldn't be here to talk about it.
Our lives depend on jupiter.
Because of the incredibly important role That jupiter's played in the evolution of life on earth, When we look at exoplanets, When we look for life elsewhere in the universe, We may not need to look just for those habitable planets.
We may need to look for jupiters or objects Like them that have saved them, as jupiter saved us.
Jupiter is the secret behind our solar system's success.
It makes life on earth possible and helps protect that life.
It may even nurture life, alien life.
Jupiter dominates its neighborhood For millions of miles, looming over at least 67 moons, From ganymede, Which is larger than the planet mercury, To a rock barely a mile across.
The innermost moons are more rocky rich.
The outermost moons are more ice rich.
So, in a lot of ways, A little miniature solar system.
Jupiter is a cosmic puppet master, Controlling and manipulating its moons And perhaps making one of them home to life.
March 1st, 2007, Nasa's new horizons probe flies past io, A moon roughly the same size as our own.
Io is one of the most interesting moons In the solar system, And not just because it looks like a pizza.
It's covered with volcanoes.
In fact, these volcanoes, one way or another, Have been continuously erupting Since we've been observing io with space probes, For the past 20 years.
This small moon Is the solar system's most volcanic body, With at least 400 active volcanoes.
Together, they pump out Than volcanoes on earth.
Io's orbit is actually slightly eccentric around jupiter.
Sometimes, it's a little closer to jupiter; Sometimes, a little farther away.
As the gravitational field changes, Io's body, the structure of the moon itself, Is twisted and pulled back and forth.
And that heat through friction, the interior of the moon, That heat basically melts it, And that erupts through the surface as volcanoes.
The volcanoes on io are really fascinating.
They're ejecting vast quantities Of sulfur dioxide above the surface of io.
It's split apart by the ultraviolet light From the sun into sulfur ions, oxygen ions, And those ions interact With the magnetic field of the planet jupiter.
Jupiter's magnetic field carries chemicals And charged particles away from io And onto its neighboring moon, europa, Making this distant, frozen world One of our best hopes of finding alien life.
When we got up close to europa with spacecraft, We saw it was covered in cracks and ridges, Which looked very much Like the way ice floes look here on earth.
And it turns out that's exactly what's going on.
We know, because of seeing the flexure of the ice And the cracks in the ice on the surface of europa That there's probably a sub-Surface ocean Deeper than the deepest of earth's oceans there On that little icy moon.
Jupiter's gravity pushes and pulls europa, Creating friction, Generating heat and melting europa from within.
Jupiter is so far away from the sun that it's natural To assume that anything around it is frozen.
The fact that gravity can heat something up enough To produce liquid water is profoundly important.
All of the indications of liquid water under the surface Have been indirect -- The way the surface looks, the resurfacing of it.
But very recently, we got direct evidence of water Under the surface of europa in the form of a geyser -- A plume of water being ejected from the south pole of the moon.
November 2013, Analyzing photographs from the hubble space telescope, Scientists spot two giant geysers spewing water 124 miles Into the atmosphere above europa's south pole.
It's the best evidence yet Of liquid water beneath europa's frozen crust.
Seeing direct evidence of liquid water on europa Is terribly exciting.
Finding liquid water is very important for finding biology.
We don't know that wherever there's water, there's biology, But we're pretty sure that without it, It would be a lot tougher.
For life to evolve, It needs water and other chemicals.
And that's where jupiter's magnetosphere comes in, The network that transports chemicals From volcanic moon io to europa.
Scientists think the magnetosphere delivers sulfur, Carbon and other minerals, And that its radiation Splits apart frozen water molecules on europa's surface Into hydrogen and oxygen.
From a biology point of view, what's important is That there's interesting stuff being made on the surface, And if that stuff could get carried into the ocean, Organisms might appreciate.
So, europa's geysers are a major discovery.
One of the more exciting aspects of seeing this geyser on europa Is it means that the liquid ocean Underneath the surface has a way of getting out, Which means maybe there's a way of stuff From the surface getting into the ocean itself.
It could be that in this ocean, There's a nutrient-Rich supply of food.
Life needs water.
It needs food and something else.
You also need an energy source.
On the earth, mostly, that's the sun.
It's light coming down and warming the surface.
On europa, though, if you're deep in that ocean, It's probably pitch black.
But life can exist without the sun.
If you go to the ocean floors on earth, There are places where there are vents, cracks in the crust, And gasses and all sorts of noxious chemicals Are coming up, but there's life there.
An ocean that there could be this flow of nutrients From the sub-Surface into an oxygen-Rich water And life living at this boundary between them, That's an example right in front of us Of how an ecosystem could be shaped that way.
Life evolves to match the conditions In which it finds itself.
The conditions under the surface of europa Are very similar to the conditions At the bottom of the ocean here on earth.
We may find life there, And if we do, it may look quite a bit like Life under the ocean here on earth.
If there is life beneath europa's surface, It may outlive us all.
This inhospitable world could become a last refuge For life in the solar system, Because 5 billion years from now, The sun is destined to die.
Jupiter, more than any other planet, Has left its mark on our solar system.
The largest planet with the strongest gravity, It shaped our past and influences our present.
But the planet's future hangs in the balance.
The ultimate fate of jupiter may rest on the fate of the sun.
And in 4 to 5 billion years, The sun will expand to become a red giant, Perhaps eating up the earth in the process.
We think that the sun's outer layers are gonna Expand possibly even to the orbit of mars.
The earth is possibly going to be engulfed And completely devoured by the expanding sun.
And when that happens, of course, It's game over for earth.
Five billion years from now, The inner rocky planets will burn up.
Will jupiter be next? From the perspective of somebody orbiting around jupiter, The sun is going to turn into this angry, fiery thing.
And yet, Jupiter itself is probably going to be relatively safe.
It may lose some of its atmosphere, But jupiter's a big planet.
It has plenty to spare.
Clearly, the region of the earth will become uninhabitable.
But what's also equally clear is The regions we now think of as remote, Far away, frozen, become much more attractive.
It'll be warmer, So its moons might actually warm up.
And it has icy moons.
Right now, they're frozen water, but with the warm sun For millions or tens of millions of years, They may actually liquefy.
And europa may become basically a gigantic water droplet, A self-Contained ocean orbiting jupiter.
It's an amazing thought.
Perhaps europa will be life's last, Best refuge as the sun dies.
As the sun evolves, Will the moons of jupiter -- Could it be That they become the prime places That we either travel to, or perhaps, Life once again begins? In our dying solar system, Jupiter's moons may offer a safe haven for life.
But jupiter's time in the sun is limited.
After the sun undergoes its dramatic red giant phase, It's going to collapse down and end its life Almost with a whimper.
It will become a white dwarf.
You wouldn't even be able to see the sun From the surface of jupiter When the sun undergoes its final stage To become a piece of nuclear waste Drifting in outer space.
Jupiter and its moons will become dark once more.
As the sun evolves into a white dwarf, Jupiter will probably go largely unaffected.
Our solar system and the evolution of the sun Won't change its orbit very much.
And it's just gonna keep trucking along and continue To orbit that old white dwarf for billions of years.
Jupiter will live on, And with it, the hope of life.
If there's life underneath the ice on europa Somewhere in the ocean beneath the surface, It's possible that it could still continue, Warmed by the tidal forces from jupiter Even after the sun has met its end as a white dwarf.
The thing is europa is already A shell of ice with liquid water That doesn't really need the energy from the sun.
So, if there's life there, It's not gonna care whether the sun's alive or dead.
They actually might outlive the sun itself.
Five billion years from now, Jupiter will take center stage.
Jupiter determines more than any other planet, How our solar system works, Much as a conductor governs the dynamics of an orchestra.
As we unlock the planet's secrets, We're discovering jupiter Is the key to our solar system's success.
We're talking about a planet That dominates the entire solar system, Whose gravity determines the very structure Of the solar system itself, A planet whose evolution helped to clean out the solar system.
So, we see that the past And the future depends on jupiter.
Jupiter has been here Since the solar system's earliest days, And it'll be here at the end.
Creator, protector, nurturer, and survivor, Jupiter shaped the solar system that we see today And makes life possible on earth and perhaps beyond.
Take the planet earth, now get 1,000 of them, And that's the size of jupiter.
Hidden beneath its swirling clouds Lie the secrets of our solar system's foundation, Of our planet's violent youth when the biggest thing in the solar system Is moving this far this fast, It changes everything around it.
and the birth of life.
If it wasn't for jupiter, right where i'm standing, There might be gigantic meteor impact crater.
Now, scientists are unlocking The giant planet's secrets and discovering that jupiter, More than any other planet, shapes our solar system's Past, present, and future.
Without jupiter, most certainly, We wouldn't be here to talk about it.
Captions paid for by discovery communications Jupiter Named after the roman king of the gods, the god of the sky, It looms between the four inner rocky planets And the three frozen gas giants beyond.
It is our largest planet by far.
Jupiter is the king of the planets, And that's because it is the biggest of the planets.
It has a storm on it that's actually four times Bigger than the earth itself, And it's been raging for hundreds of years.
It has dozens of moons, this gigantic magnetic field.
Everything about jupiter is just huge.
It doesn't do anything small.
If you were looking at our solar system from afar, You'd look and you'd say, "Our solar system is made of the sun, Jupiter, and assorted rubble.
This vast planet Contains the clues to our solar system's formation, Its evolution, and its eventual death.
Jupiter is a cosmic time capsule.
If only we could open it.
In the roman myth, jupiter, the god, Drew a veil of clouds around him to hide his mischief, And that's, to some extent, What's happened when we look at jupiter.
We're seeing not the surface of a planet, But the edge of a cloud.
This shroud of gas hides jupiter's deepest secrets.
One of the big mysteries of jupiter Is what's at the very center.
What is its core? And this is something that we actually don't know yet.
But we do know that what's happening inside jupiter Gives the planets its power.
If we want to know more about what's going on In this king of the planets, We're going to need to be able To part those clouds and peer inside.
Simple physics tells us Its massive atmosphere is the stuff of nightmares.
Because it's a gas giant, the atmosphere, As you get deeper into it, just gets denser and denser And the pressure gets higher and higher.
From the cloud tops to the planet's center Is 43,000 miles.
That's a three-Day, nonstop journey in a jumbo jet.
The decent would be a hellish roller coaster ride.
And we know this, because we've tried.
The galileo probe orbited jupiter for years Looking at the cloud tops of the planet And the moons that orbit it.
But at the end of the mission, they decided they could do One more scientific experiment.
December 7, 1995.
Nasa's galileo space craft drops a 750-Pound titanium probe Into jupiter's atmosphere.
It slams into the cloud tops at over 106,000 miles an hour.
Even though jupiter looks calm and serene from a distance, As you get closer, You realize that there are ferocious winds, There are lightning storms, And there are pressures that would crush any instrument.
The planet is 1,000 times the mass of the earth, And that means as you go inward, The pressures and densities become very large.
The probe sensors reveal that hydrogen Makes up 90% of jupiter's atmosphere.
Temperatures soar to over 300 degrees.
Winds rage at 400 miles an hour.
It's hotter and more turbulent than scientists ever imagined.
entering jupiter's atmosphere, And just 95 miles down, the probe vaporizes, Leaving most of jupiter's secrets beyond our reach.
We can't reach the planet's center, But at the national ignition facility outside san francisco, Scientists can recreate conditions deep inside jupiter.
There are a lot of other facilities Where we can generate, say, States that are found at the center of the earth Or some of the other terrestrial planets, But this is the only place You can recreate the deepest interior of jupiter.
The team takes hydrogen, The most common element in jupiter, And freezes it, increasing its density.
Then, they fire up the world's largest laser.
Multiple laser beams race through a series Of amplification chambers, Intensifying by a quadrillion times, Until, perfectly synchronized, the beams converge.
For 20 billionths of a second, The laser bombards the hydrogen with 1,000 times more energy Than the entire united states uses at any given moment.
It turns out that at those very extreme pressures, A hundred million atmospheres of pressures, Chemistry is just completely different.
Instead of really distorting the chemical bond, Now, you're distorting how the atom itself behaves.
Matter behaves in a fundamentally different way Than we experience it here on earth.
The atoms break down, Transforming the hydrogen gas into a liquid -- A liquid metal concentrated deep inside the planet.
Essentially, you would have This very dense structure, And it perhaps would look like this massive ball Of mercury at the center of jupiter.
Under immense pressure, The liquid hydrogen emits energy as heat, Pushing temperatures at the edge of this metallic sphere Up to 11,000 degrees.
What lies inside remains a mystery.
There could be a little rocky planet Underneath all of that gas and all of that liquid.
It could be more of a ball of super compressed ice.
There probably is something solid down there.
It's the processes happening inside jupiter That give the planet its power -- Power to shape the solar system since its earliest days.
Apart from the sun, Jupiter is the biggest influence in the solar system.
But this monster is shrinking.
Is jupiter losing its power? A thousand times more massive than the earth, Jupiter could swallow all the other planets In the solar system twice and still have room for more.
But this giant is getting smaller.
Gravity is still bringing All of the gases and liquids together.
And that heats up the interior of jupiter.
This heat rises up to jupiter's surface And escapes into space.
The planet cools and shrinks, Making the gas giant a third smaller today Than when it first formed.
As the planet cools, The shrinking slows from an inch a year in its infancy To just a few fractions of an inch today.
And scientists calculate it could continue shrinking For 1,000 billion years.
Even then, it will always be the solar system's Biggest, most powerful planet.
Jupiter is shrinking too slowly for us to see, But we can see the effect of this rising heat.
This is actually one of the reasons jupiter Has the spectacular weather -- All of those beautiful bands of clouds.
On earth, the sun's heat drives our weather.
Switch off the sun, and our weather would stop.
But jupiter's weather would keep on going.
Its weather doesn't come from the sun.
It comes from deep inside the planet itself.
Heat rises up through the boiling soup of gas, Churning its cocktail of volatile chemicals, Creating jupiter's spectacular swirling clouds.
And the whole time, the giant planet spins.
At 29,000 miles an hour, Jupiter rotates faster than any other planet In our solar system.
Jupiter rotates on its axis about once every nine hours, Compared to a 24-Hour day for us.
So, huge, super-Heated clouds from the interior Get smeared out by the rotation, And we have the beautiful cloud tops of jupiter.
This marriage of heat and motion spawns a monster.
Jupiter's red spot is a gigantic cyclone, Larger than the size of the earth, And has been rotating stably with winds in excess Of 250 miles per hour for over three centuries.
Imagine a storm that lasts for 300 years.
On earth, cyclones die when they hit land, But jupiter has no land to stop its storms, Almost unlimited heat to fuel them And a rapid rotation.
Jupiter is basically stoking The fires of the great red spot.
We're used to storms growing and then going away on earth, But if they're spinning the right way, Because jupiter is so big and spinning so quickly, They feed into each other, and it keeps the storm alive.
Long after the other planets freeze and die, Jupiter will still be pumping out heat, Driving its monster storms, Thanks to its immense size.
And the secret of its size Lies in the infancy of the solar system.
Just over 4.
5 billion years ago, In the disk of dust and gas leftover From the sun's formation, the first planet forms.
Jupiter began to form early on and began to gobble up Water, frozen comets, meteors, and grow.
When you imagine a litter of animals, One of them usually wins.
And the one that wins is the one That begins to eat the most first.
The same thing happened with jupiter, in some sense.
Jupiter forms at the right time And in the right place -- Just inside the frost line, The point 325 million miles from the sun Where water vapor turns to ice.
Close to the sun, Rocky planets cannot grow very big.
A little bit bigger than the earth, And the planet falls apart.
Further out, however, Ice is a glue that can hold rock together.
And so you have massive rocky ice planets Big enough to capture hydrogen gas and become a gas giant.
Close to the sun, Gas is too hot and energetic to stick to anything.
Out here, gas is cold and sluggish.
So, when gravity pulls gas towards jupiter's core, It sticks, And jupiter balloons.
And as it grew, its gravity grew, And therefore, its ability to gobble up more increased.
So it was the lucky winner By starting early and eating often.
The planet eats everything in its reach Until it becomes the giant we see today.
But 4.
5 billion years ago, jupiter is in the wrong place.
It's spiraling towards the sun and a fiery death.
The biggest planet with the biggest influence, Jupiter is unique in our solar system, But not in our galaxy.
October 1995, scientists discover The first planet beyond our solar system.
is a giant gas planet, Similar to jupiter in every way except one.
The first exoplanet found orbiting a star like the sun Was a huge surprise.
It was called a hot jupiter Because it's something roughly the size of jupiter, But it was tremendously close in to its star, Much closer, even, than mercury is to the sun.
Since that first discovery, Astronomers have identified hundreds of gas giants Outside our solar system.
Many orbit extremely close to their parent star.
The planet wasp-33 b, Orbits so close to its star That its surface is a scorching 5,800 degrees.
It's the hottest planet ever observed in the universe.
Now, we know that planets like that can't form there.
It's just too hot to be able to coalesce from all the gas.
These hot jupiters must have formed farther out.
How do you get a jupiter-Like planet That close to a star? Somehow, you need to be able to build a big planet And then move it in.
And this had us asking all kinds of questions.
If we see it going on elsewhere in the universe, Is that how our own solar system worked, too? So now, when we look at jupiter, We think, "all right, that's where it is today, "But it doesn't mean it's always been there.
"It could have moved all over the place, "And it just ended up where it is -- Where we find it today.
" The question is how? How did this giant planet end up where it is today? And what effect did a migrating jupiter Have on the other planets? In 2011, walsh and his team re-Imagined the solar system.
They set jupiter adrift, and in the process, They solve one of the solar system's greatest puzzles.
We would build our models, would get a venus Right where the venus is supposed to be, Would get an earth right where the earth is supposed to be.
But where mars is today, We were usually getting a venus or earth-Massed planet.
No matter what we did, no matter how we changed the model, We were always getting a really big mars.
All of our simulation Showed that mars, where it is in the disk, Should be at least ten times the mass that it is.
Something came in and literally ate mars' lunch.
And that something was jupiter.
Four and a half billion years ago, Jupiter forms 325 million miles from the sun, Roughly a third closer than it is today.
The orbiting planet collides With the debris left over from the sun's formation, And these collisions slow it down.
It loses momentum, And the sun's gravity pulls it closer.
Jupiter spirals inwards, Gobbling up the raw materials that should have made mars.
So, seeing that result, seeing a great solution To the small mars problem was kind of the eureka moment.
Like, well, maybe there's a mechanism out there.
We know that planets migrate.
So, let's put these two things together, And maybe this is going to work.
As jupiter travels inwards, It bulldozes the rocky material that lies in its path.
On the inward migration, there's a lot of material there.
It actually pushes almost all of that, About 80 % of it, inward.
And when we make the movies in a certain way, It really looks like a snowplow.
The gas and dust squeeze Into an inner disk around the sun.
As jupiter orbits, It pushes against this disk, creating a bulge.
The bulge races round the disk, pulling jupiter with it.
Jupiter accelerates and tries to pull away from the sun.
But the debris behind jupiter continues pushing inwards.
It's a cosmic stalemate, With the planet trapped between the inner and outer disks.
Then, something extraordinary happens.
The giant planet changes direction.
As we're building this model, We've had this vision of jupiter coming inwards, Turning around and going outwards.
And we thought of it as a sailboat, Kind of tacking, coming about, turning through the wind.
So, the name "the grand tack model," It actually comes from sailing terminology.
But jupiter is no yacht.
It's a giant supertanker of a planet.
Changing its course is going to take something Seriously powerful.
Enter the solar system's second largest planet, Saturn.
Like jupiter before it, Saturn has spiraled inwards, closing in on the giant planet.
Amazingly, there was this wonderful interplay Between jupiter and saturn.
As they ate up all the material around them, There was a gap in the disk left over.
With less material behind jupiter and saturn, There's less holding the planets in place, Allowing the force from the bulging disk To fling jupiter back out, With saturn hitching a ride.
The key for stopping jupiter's inward migration In the grand tack is saturn.
Saturn growing at the right time and at the right place Allowed it to migrate close to jupiter and change And stop jupiter's inward migration.
Saturn saves jupiter from a fiery fate.
And this grand tack Leaves a parting gift, the earth itself, Because when jupiter migrates out, It leaves behind the rocky debris it bulldozed in.
It's from this debris that the earth forms.
But beyond mars, jupiter's powerful gravity Pulls on the debris, preventing it from sticking together, Leaving the rubble scattered as a band of asteroids.
Jupiter's gravity is so strong that it determines in some ways What can exist where in the solar system And what can't.
The rocky planets, Our planet, And beyond mars, The asteroid belt, They all exist because of jupiter's epic journey.
When the biggest thing in the solar system Is moving this far this fast, It changes everything around it.
Five million years after it first formed, Jupiter reaches its present orbit.
Its outward movement And the inward pull of the sun's gravity are finally balanced, But this is still not the solar system that we see today.
The end point of the grand tack model Was actually the ideal beginnings Of what we think happened Later on in solar system history.
But from this stable orbit, Jupiter is about to trigger a deadly domino effect That threatens to destroy the infant earth.
Four and a half billion years ago, Jupiter orbits between the rocky inner planets And the icy outer planets.
From this strategic vantage point, The gas giant dominates our planetary system And unleashes hell.
In the early environment of the solar system, Where there was a lot more junk surrounding the earth And in the inner solar system, the earth was bombarded, As were all other objects, at an incredible rate.
It's an incredibly violent time in solar system history.
We refer to that timescale about several hundred million years After the planets actually formed As the late heavy bombardment.
These were very large-Scale impacts And they actually do create melt pools -- Liquid rock on the floors of these impact craters.
And some of those craters can glow hot For tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years, In some cases.
If you were actually on the earth at that time, There would have been enormous balls of dust Continuously thrown into the atmosphere.
The sky would be hazy, cloudy, And the terrain would be mountainous From the rims of craters all around, rocky, And a wholly unpleasant place to be.
Today, the scars have healed.
Glaciers advance and retreat.
Volcanoes erupt.
Wind and water erase our planet's dust.
But the evidence is still visible if we look up.
Look at the moon.
Every night, you see the moon coming out, And it's pockmarked, Because for about a billion years After the solar system was formed, there was chaos.
In 2011, nasa's spitzer space telescope Reveals this kind of bombardment around another star.
Astronomers see a vast disk of gas and dust Circling a young star called eta corvi.
This may be evidence of icy comets and asteroids Swarming into its inner solar system.
Four billion years ago, The same thing was happening in our solar system.
There was a wave of material, asteroids and comets, That swept in from the outer solar system.
It turns out it probably came from jupiter and saturn, The outer planets.
As they were orbiting the sun, They were interacting with each other gravitationally -- A very complicated dance.
Jupiter goes around the sun three times Every two times that saturn does.
And so, when they would migrate outwards, They'd be locked in this resonance.
They'd be very close to each other.
And at some point, as they were moving around, Their gravitational powers basically combined, Got a little bit better at affecting the material Around them.
Together, the two inner gas giants Sling the two outer gas giants, uranus and neptune, Even farther out.
Uranus and neptune swap places.
Neptune slams into the frozen dust and gas In the solar system's outer reaches, Scattering icy debris far and wide.
In the inner solar system, This debris collides with the asteroid belt.
Billions of comets and asteroids swarm Across the orbits of the earth, moon, and other inner planets.
If that had persisted, Then life never could have evolved.
Only after a few hundred million years Was it possible for life on earth to develop.
But this destruction contains the seeds of creation Because the icy comets deliver a precious cargo.
Jupiter periodically disturbs Objects in the outer solar system, largely water objects, And directs the towards the earth.
Nowadays, that would be a disaster, But in fact, if you look at the water on earth, It's quite likely that almost all of the water on earth That's now here came from ice that impacted upon the earth, Directed here by jupiter.
Every ocean, every river, Every drop of rain may owe its existence to jupiter.
The gas giant may have even sowed the seeds of life itself.
The chemical building blocks Of life may have hitched a ride to earth on-Board a comet.
Without jupiter, life would have never started, And it would have never survived.
The main bombardment ended 3.
8 billion years ago, But a threat remains.
Every day, nasa's near-Earth objects program scans the skies For potentially dangerous asteroids and comets.
So far, they've spotted over 10,000.
And it only takes one to cause a catastrophe.
Just three miles wide, This small comet is big enough to wipe out life on earth.
Luckily, jupiter is in the way.
Jupiter acts, in a lot of ways, Like the protector of the inner solar system.
By shepherding comets in its vicinity, Ejecting them from the solar system, Jupiter helps protect the earth itself.
In a sense, the way objects move in a solar system Is a little bit like a roller derby.
You've got all of these objects moving around the sun In the same direction, going around and around and around.
But they have gravity, and they can interact with each other.
Imagine this skater in white Is an icy comet racing in from the outer solar system.
The skaters in black are the gas giants.
The comets veer across the planets' orbits Until it encounters jupiter.
Jupiter moves faster than the comet.
Then, the giant planet's gravity Grabs it and gives it an assist in a slingshot maneuver.
The comet steals some of jupiter's momentum, Accelerates, and changes direction.
Jupiter can fling it out of the solar system By giving it that extra velocity, And it goes away.
It's ejected.
Jupiter slings objects out and stands guard.
Every year, 200 times more comets and asteroids Smash into jupiter than the earth.
Something had to be there like a sheriff To clean out all the riffraff and clean out all the debris, And that's the planet jupiter.
If it wasn't for jupiter, right where i'm standing, There might be gigantic meteor impact crater.
Without jupiter, most certainly, We wouldn't be here to talk about it.
Our lives depend on jupiter.
Because of the incredibly important role That jupiter's played in the evolution of life on earth, When we look at exoplanets, When we look for life elsewhere in the universe, We may not need to look just for those habitable planets.
We may need to look for jupiters or objects Like them that have saved them, as jupiter saved us.
Jupiter is the secret behind our solar system's success.
It makes life on earth possible and helps protect that life.
It may even nurture life, alien life.
Jupiter dominates its neighborhood For millions of miles, looming over at least 67 moons, From ganymede, Which is larger than the planet mercury, To a rock barely a mile across.
The innermost moons are more rocky rich.
The outermost moons are more ice rich.
So, in a lot of ways, A little miniature solar system.
Jupiter is a cosmic puppet master, Controlling and manipulating its moons And perhaps making one of them home to life.
March 1st, 2007, Nasa's new horizons probe flies past io, A moon roughly the same size as our own.
Io is one of the most interesting moons In the solar system, And not just because it looks like a pizza.
It's covered with volcanoes.
In fact, these volcanoes, one way or another, Have been continuously erupting Since we've been observing io with space probes, For the past 20 years.
This small moon Is the solar system's most volcanic body, With at least 400 active volcanoes.
Together, they pump out Than volcanoes on earth.
Io's orbit is actually slightly eccentric around jupiter.
Sometimes, it's a little closer to jupiter; Sometimes, a little farther away.
As the gravitational field changes, Io's body, the structure of the moon itself, Is twisted and pulled back and forth.
And that heat through friction, the interior of the moon, That heat basically melts it, And that erupts through the surface as volcanoes.
The volcanoes on io are really fascinating.
They're ejecting vast quantities Of sulfur dioxide above the surface of io.
It's split apart by the ultraviolet light From the sun into sulfur ions, oxygen ions, And those ions interact With the magnetic field of the planet jupiter.
Jupiter's magnetic field carries chemicals And charged particles away from io And onto its neighboring moon, europa, Making this distant, frozen world One of our best hopes of finding alien life.
When we got up close to europa with spacecraft, We saw it was covered in cracks and ridges, Which looked very much Like the way ice floes look here on earth.
And it turns out that's exactly what's going on.
We know, because of seeing the flexure of the ice And the cracks in the ice on the surface of europa That there's probably a sub-Surface ocean Deeper than the deepest of earth's oceans there On that little icy moon.
Jupiter's gravity pushes and pulls europa, Creating friction, Generating heat and melting europa from within.
Jupiter is so far away from the sun that it's natural To assume that anything around it is frozen.
The fact that gravity can heat something up enough To produce liquid water is profoundly important.
All of the indications of liquid water under the surface Have been indirect -- The way the surface looks, the resurfacing of it.
But very recently, we got direct evidence of water Under the surface of europa in the form of a geyser -- A plume of water being ejected from the south pole of the moon.
November 2013, Analyzing photographs from the hubble space telescope, Scientists spot two giant geysers spewing water 124 miles Into the atmosphere above europa's south pole.
It's the best evidence yet Of liquid water beneath europa's frozen crust.
Seeing direct evidence of liquid water on europa Is terribly exciting.
Finding liquid water is very important for finding biology.
We don't know that wherever there's water, there's biology, But we're pretty sure that without it, It would be a lot tougher.
For life to evolve, It needs water and other chemicals.
And that's where jupiter's magnetosphere comes in, The network that transports chemicals From volcanic moon io to europa.
Scientists think the magnetosphere delivers sulfur, Carbon and other minerals, And that its radiation Splits apart frozen water molecules on europa's surface Into hydrogen and oxygen.
From a biology point of view, what's important is That there's interesting stuff being made on the surface, And if that stuff could get carried into the ocean, Organisms might appreciate.
So, europa's geysers are a major discovery.
One of the more exciting aspects of seeing this geyser on europa Is it means that the liquid ocean Underneath the surface has a way of getting out, Which means maybe there's a way of stuff From the surface getting into the ocean itself.
It could be that in this ocean, There's a nutrient-Rich supply of food.
Life needs water.
It needs food and something else.
You also need an energy source.
On the earth, mostly, that's the sun.
It's light coming down and warming the surface.
On europa, though, if you're deep in that ocean, It's probably pitch black.
But life can exist without the sun.
If you go to the ocean floors on earth, There are places where there are vents, cracks in the crust, And gasses and all sorts of noxious chemicals Are coming up, but there's life there.
An ocean that there could be this flow of nutrients From the sub-Surface into an oxygen-Rich water And life living at this boundary between them, That's an example right in front of us Of how an ecosystem could be shaped that way.
Life evolves to match the conditions In which it finds itself.
The conditions under the surface of europa Are very similar to the conditions At the bottom of the ocean here on earth.
We may find life there, And if we do, it may look quite a bit like Life under the ocean here on earth.
If there is life beneath europa's surface, It may outlive us all.
This inhospitable world could become a last refuge For life in the solar system, Because 5 billion years from now, The sun is destined to die.
Jupiter, more than any other planet, Has left its mark on our solar system.
The largest planet with the strongest gravity, It shaped our past and influences our present.
But the planet's future hangs in the balance.
The ultimate fate of jupiter may rest on the fate of the sun.
And in 4 to 5 billion years, The sun will expand to become a red giant, Perhaps eating up the earth in the process.
We think that the sun's outer layers are gonna Expand possibly even to the orbit of mars.
The earth is possibly going to be engulfed And completely devoured by the expanding sun.
And when that happens, of course, It's game over for earth.
Five billion years from now, The inner rocky planets will burn up.
Will jupiter be next? From the perspective of somebody orbiting around jupiter, The sun is going to turn into this angry, fiery thing.
And yet, Jupiter itself is probably going to be relatively safe.
It may lose some of its atmosphere, But jupiter's a big planet.
It has plenty to spare.
Clearly, the region of the earth will become uninhabitable.
But what's also equally clear is The regions we now think of as remote, Far away, frozen, become much more attractive.
It'll be warmer, So its moons might actually warm up.
And it has icy moons.
Right now, they're frozen water, but with the warm sun For millions or tens of millions of years, They may actually liquefy.
And europa may become basically a gigantic water droplet, A self-Contained ocean orbiting jupiter.
It's an amazing thought.
Perhaps europa will be life's last, Best refuge as the sun dies.
As the sun evolves, Will the moons of jupiter -- Could it be That they become the prime places That we either travel to, or perhaps, Life once again begins? In our dying solar system, Jupiter's moons may offer a safe haven for life.
But jupiter's time in the sun is limited.
After the sun undergoes its dramatic red giant phase, It's going to collapse down and end its life Almost with a whimper.
It will become a white dwarf.
You wouldn't even be able to see the sun From the surface of jupiter When the sun undergoes its final stage To become a piece of nuclear waste Drifting in outer space.
Jupiter and its moons will become dark once more.
As the sun evolves into a white dwarf, Jupiter will probably go largely unaffected.
Our solar system and the evolution of the sun Won't change its orbit very much.
And it's just gonna keep trucking along and continue To orbit that old white dwarf for billions of years.
Jupiter will live on, And with it, the hope of life.
If there's life underneath the ice on europa Somewhere in the ocean beneath the surface, It's possible that it could still continue, Warmed by the tidal forces from jupiter Even after the sun has met its end as a white dwarf.
The thing is europa is already A shell of ice with liquid water That doesn't really need the energy from the sun.
So, if there's life there, It's not gonna care whether the sun's alive or dead.
They actually might outlive the sun itself.
Five billion years from now, Jupiter will take center stage.
Jupiter determines more than any other planet, How our solar system works, Much as a conductor governs the dynamics of an orchestra.
As we unlock the planet's secrets, We're discovering jupiter Is the key to our solar system's success.
We're talking about a planet That dominates the entire solar system, Whose gravity determines the very structure Of the solar system itself, A planet whose evolution helped to clean out the solar system.
So, we see that the past And the future depends on jupiter.
Jupiter has been here Since the solar system's earliest days, And it'll be here at the end.
Creator, protector, nurturer, and survivor, Jupiter shaped the solar system that we see today And makes life possible on earth and perhaps beyond.